Primary School Is Back
Well, I'm gonna give this a try.
Primary School went on hiatus due to changes in the personal and professional lives of its authors. But while my coauthor has moved on, I haven't. I wouldn't know how to walk away from politics even if I wanted to. And my own professional circumstances have changed again, putting me in a place where I now believe I'm once again going to be capable of running the newsletter. So I'm back! But on a different platform, with a different pricing structure, because the cold reality is I need to make more money than I did in law school and the newsletter was, in hindsight, priced a little low for the amount of work that went into it, especially because the scope of what we did on a regular basis for our unpaid subscribers expanded over time.
For the first month of this, I'm not going to paywall—though I will accept subscriptions, I do understand that I need to reestablish myself after a hiatus. After that, I'm going to paywall all but a brief summary of the week's top items at $6/month. It'll be the same basic format: a regular weekly newsletter accompanied by day-of (or day-before) previews of primaries and nonpartisan elections. The FEC roundups will be their own posts now, and a different pricing tier ($8/month, inclusive of the regular newsletter and previews.) The most noteworthy fundraising numbers will warrant items in the regular newsletter, but the FEC roundups will be exhaustive and as close to immediate after the filing deadline as possible. The first post will be a bit weird because the 2025 and 2026 cycles have been moving for months now—it'll be more of a roundup of the year so far. You can expect items touching on the retirements of Dick Durbin and Gerry Connolly, journalist/influencer Kat Abughazaleh's upstart Chicago congressional campaign, the recent ICE arrest of Newark Mayor Ras Baraka amidst a wild New Jersey gubernatorial race, and the return of Primary School bête noire Andrew Cuomo—plus much more, including a belated FEC roundup for the first quarter of 2025. This first issue of the new iteration of Primary School will come out sometime this week (I truthfully don't know when, but I'm aiming for early in the week), and subsequent issues will come every Monday.
I've missed Primary School, and I'm so glad to be back. Let's get started.